Software for running a park, not for taking a cut of it.

Meet the Founder

Stephen Richards, Founder & Developer

Stephen's introduction to computers was at secondary school in 1974, hand-writing Machine Code onto gridded paper to be run on a mainframe computer at Connah's Quay Technical College — with the results sent back the following week.

Steve is the first to admit that in years he may seem old, but his mind is as active and playful as it was when he was 10 years old, and that is one of the things that makes him fun to work with. But don't mistake fun for lacking knowledge!

Leaving school in 1976 aged 16 Steve ran away to join a flying circus - usually known as the Royal Air Force. Working in electronics on RADAR and communications equipment, it was the continuation of his digital learning. His last five years of an 18-year service were spent in an Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) department on the System Management Team and also writing models for microchips. During that time the department's mainframe was replaced in a £3.9 million upgrade that cut the run time of its biggest ATE program from almost two weeks to effectively instant.

After leaving the RAF, Stephen worked for a charity in Leicester called Apex Leicester Project before returning to electronics. Then Steve moved back into IT Support — including migrating a 300-user company from a Linux mail server to Microsoft Exchange saving the company over £12k in hardware costs while purchacing from Dell. In 2006, he started his own company back in North Wales: Computer Technical Solutions, an MSP that later became an MSSP as he pursued a long-standing interest in cybersecurity.

By this time, Steve had a Masters Degree in IT with Cybersecurity from Wrexham University

Steve officially retired in 2025, financially secure. Within months, he started building the software he'd spent nearly two decades wishing existed — tools that were either prohibitively expensive or simply didn't offer a complete answer for smaller MSPs and MSSPs.

That was it - Steve realised he needed to keep his brain active..... Retirement over! By October 2026, two pieces of software had been built: Netmon, the network monitoring and security platform at the centre of Angstep, and ParkCore, a separate management platform for holiday and caravan parks.

One system, one flat fee

Most parks run on a patchwork: a booking platform that takes a slice of every stay, a separate till, a spreadsheet for owners’ site fees, a rota on the wall and payroll typed in by hand. ParkCore replaces the lot with one system, billed as one flat monthly fee instead of a percentage of your bookings.

• BookingsRate calendar, website booking widget, availability calendar
• PaymentsCard terminals, payment links by text, tabs on a card hold
• Till and stockEPOS, stock counts, purchase orders emailed to suppliers
• OwnersSite-fee run, utility billing from meter readings, owner portal
• StaffRecords, right to work, rotas, clock in, timesheets, payroll
• AccountsDaily takings posted to Xero or QuickFile
• GuestsGuest CRM, email campaigns, automated marketing
• OperationsActivities, maintenance, housekeeping, sales CRM, reports

Every part of it is written up in our public user manual, so you can see exactly how it works before you ever pick up the phone.

Disrupting price points

ParkCore was built by Stephen Richards. Steve wrote his first program in 1994 and has been writing software ever since, from machine code through to C++, C# and Python. For years he managed IT systems for holiday parks as a managed security services provider, sitting in the back offices where parks actually get run.

What he saw there kept bothering him. The leading park systems all did broadly similar things, but very few of them were designed to take work off the people using them. And the price almost always climbed with the features. Want owner invoicing? Next tier up. Payroll? That’s an add-on.

The result: the smaller parks, the ones who’d gain the most from saving a few hours a week, were the ones priced out of the features that would save them.

ParkCore follows Angstep’s founding idea, “Disrupting Price Points”. Every park gets every feature. After an introductory first-year price, ParkCore is £499 a month per park, and that’s the whole bill. The savings show up where they matter: fewer hours on admin, fewer things typed in twice, and more time with guests.

Operated by Angstep Ltd

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